Dan Bricklin

Founder and President of Software Garden, Inc Dan Bricklin is founder and president of Software Garden, Inc., a small consulting firm and software application developer. Products Dan personally developed at Software Garden include the SocialCalc Open Source Web-spreadsheet, the Dan Bricklin’s Demo Program prototyping tool on the original IBM PC, and the Note Taker HD app for the Apple iPad. He is a frequent speaker and commentator on the software industry, software development, and innovation. A collection of Dan’s blog posts was published in the book Bricklin on Technology. [Dan also invented the Spreadsheet.]

Sir Terry Matthews

Founder and Chairman of Wesley Clover Sir Terence Matthews is the founder and Chairman of Wesley Clover, an investment vehicle and holding company.  Terry has either founded or funded over 80 companies since 1972 including Newbridge Networks, a company he founded in 1986 and which became a leader in the worldwide data networking industry. In 1972, before launching Newbridge, Terry co-founded Mitel, a world leader in the design and manufacture of enterprise communications solutions.  Wesley Clover now has interests in a broad range of next-generation technology companies, real estate, hotels and resorts.

Dave McClure

Investor – 500startups.com You’re a wantrepreneur.  You’re fat and happy. You’re clueless.  You have no business doing a new business.  And yet, you’re here in Montreal, all light-hearted and warm and fuzzy with your unicorns and  rainbows. Well wake the fuck up you idiot. This ain’t no walk in the park.  If you want to be a real entrepreneur, you’re gonna have to learn how to fall on your face a few times. HARD. If you’re still ready to deal with that harsh reality, then Welcome. And Be Afraid.

Chris Shipley

Cofounder & CEO – GuideWire Group Silicon Valley entrepreneurship is fueled by hype cycles as much as by technical innovation or the quest for the “next big thing”. Today we’re approaching the peak of possibly the biggest – and most limiting – hype bubble in the past decade. The bubble is hyper inflated by common maxims that – while true at their core – are widely misunderstood, misinterpreted, and misused to misguide young businesses.  Chris explores the five  ‘True Lies’ Shaping Startups in the US Today and how you can take advantage of the situation to grow a better business.

Stowe Boyd

Curator at The Futures Agency Managing Director, Chief Researcher at Work Talk Stowe is an internationally recognized authority on social tools and their impact on media, business, and society. He is best known for his commentary on the social revolution, the rise of social tools, and the new world ahead of us at stoweboyd.com, his random observations and curation at underpaidgenius.com, and his public speaking. In recent years Stowe has spoken at Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Office 2.0, Net:work, Reboot, Defrag, 140 Characters, Lift, Shift, Sibos, TEDxMidAtlantic, SxSW, and many others.

Danielle Morrill

Head of Marketing for Twilio Danielle is Head of Marketing for Twilio, the industry leading cloud communications company offering tools that unlock the black box of telecom for more than 85,000 developers and businesses worldwide. She is also a Mentor in Residence for 500 Startups and handful of other awesome startup accelerators and entrepreneurship programs across the U.S. and Europe.  Meet her at daniellemorrill.com

Stephan Ouaknine

President and CEO, Managing Partner – Inerjys Ventures Some startup technology companies are hitting their stride and leaving former market makers in the dust. Why is this? Stephan will explore basic business fundamentals: Choosing target markets wisely. Cash flow management. Caring about revenues sooner rather than later. Protecting margins, reaching and maintaining profitability. These and others key factors will lead to shareholder value. The only true measure of success.

Mitch Joel

President at Twist Image
Joel is the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Canadian Marketing Association and a former Board Member of the Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada. He has been involved with the content committee for both Shop.org and the Web Analytics Association, and is on the advisory council for many businesses and charitable organizations.

Lisa Gansky

@instigating
entrepreneur. investor. instigator. author.
Lisa is, at heart, a marketect and “impact junky” with a strong interest in breaking the edges of formerly happy business models and bringing together not-so-likely characters in the form of new offerings, teams and partnerships.
As CEO, co-founder and chairman of Ofoto, Lisa worked to develop Ofoto into a world-class consumer services offering which she left once Kodak Gallery reached over 45M customers in 2005. Prior to that, she was a Co-founder and CEO of GNN, the first commercial website, acquired by AOL in 1995 where she then directed Internet Services for AOL through 1997. Lisa has been an investor and board member of more than twenty internet and mobile services companies.
Currently, Lisa serves as an advisor and investor in Loosecubes, RelayRides, Taskrabbit, Honest Buildings, pi.pe, TasteBook, Scoot networks, Squidoo, Greenbiz, Greenstart, Mingoville and Convio.

Graham Hill

Founder, Treehugger.com and VP Interactive at Discovery’s Planet Green
An Entrepreneur, Graham has a Bachelor of Architecture from Carleton and studied Product Design at Emily Carr. In 95′, with his cousin, he built, and later sold, the web-developer, SiteWerks, to 60 people doing work for clients such as Microsoft. In 03′, he founded both TreeHugger.com and iconic ceramic cup business; wearehappytoserveyou.com. TreeHugger later became part of Discovery and is where he currently consults part-time alongside his “Luxury of Less” project; LifeEdited.com.

Randy Smerik

CEO & Founder – Osunatech If you’re trying to sell your company, then you have two products: what you sell, and the company itself. Knowing who your likely acquirers are means you can tailor the organization to potential buyers, just as you’d design a product for specific customers. In this session, we’ll look at how to adjust your tone, staff, geographic location, pricing, and every other aspect of your business to make yourself an easy target for buyers.

Deborah Shultz

Senior Fellow, Innovation & Design at Altimeter Group Founder, Co-Host at Tummelvision. tv Deb is an Internet industry veteran and open-web advocate who merges expertise in design, marketing, technology & and innovation to bring fresh approaches to business.  She is widely recognized for her practical understanding of the dynamics of the social web and its impact on culture, society and business. Her work architecting the Social Media Lab for P&G focused on customer relationships and reinventing the nature of the company’s customer connection. Her current work focuses on the importance of real-world experimentation, open-innovation and the new human dynamics required for both startups and large organizations to succeed in an always-on connected world.

Cindy Gallop

Founder & CEO, IfWeRanTheWorld Cindy Gallop’s background is brandbuilding, marketing and advertising – she started up the US office of ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty in New York in 1998 and in 2003 was named Advertising Woman of the Year.  She is the founder and CEO of www.IfWeRanTheWorld.com, a  web meets world platform that turns good intentions into action, one microaction at a time, to deliver Action Branding and build your Action Graph, which launched in beta with a demo at TED 2010, and of www.makelovenotporn.com, launched at TED 2009.

Craig Walker

Firespotter Labs – CEO, Founder Craig brings 15 years of experience as an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, corporate executive and attorney to Firespotter. Prior to founding Firespotter this January, Craig was Entrepreneur in Residence at Google Ventures, where he developed the idea of Firespotter Labs. Craig was a technology venture investor at Sterling Payot Capital and TeleSoft Partners and was also a corporate attorney at top tier law firms in Silicon Valley, where he represented companies ranging from early stage start-ups to Cisco Systems. He is a graduate of UC Berkeley (BA), Georgetown University (MBA) and Boalt Hall School of Law (JD).

John Wood

Founder and Board Co-Chairman Room to Read At age 35, John Wood left an executive career track at Microsoft Corporation to form Room to Read, a nonprofit organization that “combines the heart of Mother Theresa with the scalability of Starbucks” to help children across the developing world break the cycle of poverty through the power of education. Razor-sharp business acumen honed at Microsoft, combined with a passion to change the world makes John Wood a unique, inspiring and popular speaker with universal appeal.

Paul Mockapetris

Chief Scientist and Chairman of the Board at Nominum – Inventor of the Domain Name System (DNS) Paul Mockapetris is an Internet advocate and investor, with interests ranging from cloud computing to optical networking. He is best known as the creator of the Domain Name System (DNS), used for the Internet’s email and web addresses, and wrote the first implementation of SMTP, the Internet’s email system.

Sizhao Yang

COO/co-founder at BetterWorks, Inc. Sizhao “Zao” Yang is currently the COO/co-founder at BetterWorks, Inc., a perks platform for small medium businesses. Previously, he co-created Farmville, and was the CEO/co-founder of MyMiniLife, Inc. (sold to Zynga Game Networks, Inc.).  After the acquisition, MyMiniLife became the common technology platform at Zynga and powers 150M monthly users including games like Cityville, Farmville, and Frontierville. He also designed the Farmville iPhone application (top iPhone app), and worked on corporate development deals including Microsoft, Yahoo, Zynga Japan, and Zynga corporate strategy. He is also an active investor with stakes in companies like Hipmunk, GroupMe, Facebook, Zynga (acquisition stock), and SV Angels. He received a B.S. in computer science at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

Jody Sherman

CEO and Co-founder ecomom Meet Jody Sherman. The founder of ecomom. Albeit a bit unusual for a man with no children to come up with the idea for a company dedicated to providing moms with easy access to the world’s best, healthiest products, it all started with a chance encounter of two moms at a local Whole Foods who were looking for healthier products for their families. It was upon meeting these moms that Jody was inspired and realized he could fuse two of his passion points; customer service and healthy living with his professional experience; a successful 20 year career in the digital space, to create ecomom.com.

Gary Pudles

President and CEO of AnswerNet He founded AnswerNet in 1998 and has driven the growth of the organization through sales, acquisitions and partnerships. Gary has won the prestigious “Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year” award, the American Teleservices Association’s “Spirit of Philanthropy Award,” and has led AnswerNet to numerous awards including gaining the #21 spot on Inc. Magazine’s Inc. 500 List of America’s Fastest Growing Private Companies in one of his five appearances on that list.

Jonathan Gosier

Founder, metaLayer Inc Jonathan Gosier is a software developer, designer and inventor who has led a number of successful technology projects across Africa. His company Appfrica has invested in a number innovation initiatives across the continent including QuestionBox, HiveColab, Abayima, Women in Technology Uganda and many others. Launched in 2008, Appfrica (appfricalabs.com) has become one of the regions most well known places to source African talent for project management or software development. Appfrica is also the organizer of the annual Apps4Africa competition which encourages African software developers to develop solutions to local problems.

Julien Smith

author, professional voice actor, radio broadcaster, consultant, speaker and MC at our event Julien Smith is the bestselling author of two books: the first, Trust Agents (with Chris Brogan) was a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. His most recent,The Flinch, was published on theDomino Project with over 100,000 copies distributed.
Despite being known best for his writing, Julien’s best communications skills lie in his public speaking. He has traveled all over the United States, Canada and the world to not only talk about adaptation to change, but also to incite it to actually happen. On the social web, his ability to get audiences out of their seats and actually change their behaviour is second-to-none.

Marc Gingras

Sr. Director, Handheld Applications Marc Gingras is a serial entrepreneur.  He founded Tungle Corporation in 2006 and served as its Chief Executive Officer until its acquisition by Research In Motion in 2011.  He’s currently a Senior Director for Research in Motion, responsible for the product management and R&D for PIM and Messaging.

Jamie Siminoff

CEO & co-founder – Unsubscribe.com Every growing business faces ten critical challenges it must overcome. From establishing an ecosystem, to dealing with channel conflict, to assigning equity incentives, each of these challenges can be a huge time-sink and, if not handled properly, can undermine the startup. In this session, we’ll flag the ten challenges, and offer practical advice on how to mitigate their impact so you don’t break your stride.

Even Nisselson

Entrepreneur, Investor LDV Capital, MC for our Event Evan Nisselson is a serial entrepreneur and digital media expert for over 17 years. He mentors at Seedcamp [Europe], 500Startups, Mind The Bridge [Italy], NYSeed [NY], and Tetuan Valley [Madrid]. He thrives on building teams and businesses that leverage technology to entertain, increase efficiency, and solve problems.

Dan Martel

Co-Founder – Clarity

Dan Martell is the co-founder of Clarity a service that lets you get advice from the worlds best entrepreneurs. Previously he co-founded www.Flowtown.com, a social marketing platform for small businesses, that was acquired by DemandForce.com. An award-winning Canadian entrepreneur, at 25, Dan formed his first start-up, Spheric Technologies Inc., and watched it grow by an average of 152% per year before he sold the company 4 years later in mid-2008. Now living in San Francisco, Martell spends the majority of his time looking at ways to build a bridge between Silicon Valley and his home province of New Brunswick, Canada. As an angel investor, he’s invested in over 15 companies, advising them on how to leverage social marketing to acquire customers. Martell is passionately involved in facilitating micro-lending to entrepreneurs in developing countries through the non-profit, Kiva.org.

Gregarious Narain

Co-Founder of Chute
Greg’s been discussing, designing and developing social tools and applications since 2003. Armed with a background in sociology, design and development, Greg constantly seek out new and interesting ways to put the human collective to use.

Currently, he is the Co-Founder of Chute, a media platform for developers, publishers and brands.

Prior to Chute, Greg was the VP of Product (and first hire) at Klout where he helped establish the Klout Score as the standard for influence online.

Damien Steel

Venture Investor – OMERS Ventures
In his role at OMERS Ventures, Damien Steel is responsible for contributing to the identification and execution of investment opportunities in the Technology, Media and Telecommunications (TMT) sectors. Damien works closely with investee management teams on all aspects of their business including finance, acquisitions, and overall growth strategies. Prior to joining OMERS Ventures, Damien was a Vice President with EdgeStone Capital Partners’ venture capital funds. Damien has over 10 years of experience working with growth companies.

Damien has previously served on the boards of Protus (sold to J2 Communications), Shoplogix and OverlayTV.

Damien has an H.B.B.A from Wilfrid Laurier University, is a CA and a CFA charter holder.